Bede's Challenge #1

During this game Aabra01: Training for Midlevel Micromanagers TGOM put this challenge to the players:

Here is a micromananger's dream. The goal is maximum beakers and the exercise requires reassigning every single citizen and any other micromanagement tactic you can execute.

Five players picked up the gauntlet, including TGOM and the results will be listed listed by total beaker output as soon as I can get my calculator to work.

and bragging rights go to Aabra

The standings

Total Beakers
Aabra 1639
TimBentley 1617
Phaedo 1603
Bede 1584
gmaharriet 1574

Beakers generated at 100% science
Aabra 1282
Tim 1239
Phaedo 1450
Bede 1281
gmaH 1148

Scientists employed
Aabra 119
Tim 126
Phaedo 51
Bede 101
gma 142


As with any contest (like Miss USA) winning brings certain responsibilities. So I call upon Aabra to tell us he does it.

Nice going Aabra.

There were some interesting things I noticed while playing this. I first went for maxing gold (mistakingly). What I did find though is that cities with 33% or less corruption were better off putting citizens to work. When I was maxing science, that went up to 45% or less. After that: for gold, taxmen were always better than cops; for beakers, cops were better for 100% science. As I didn't quite get the scoring until it was too late I didn't find out when it was better to hire a scientist but my gut feeling is that with the 3 beaker multiplication, scientist are always going to be better than cops (as it was with gold).

Just for the record, my beaker count just before the end of turn was 1291. I'm still doing some experiments that I will post (I guess cop shops aren't just for WW). EDIT: I used CAII to check the 100% science but it lied. The actual was 1280

What really surprised me was that upkeep had no impact on science. I have run it through a couple of times and there is absolutely no difference in beakers with all the upkeep or after selling off all the raxes, banks and stocks. At 100% science, I would have thought that the extra available gold would have gone to research. Where did it go?

It simply gets substracted from your gold surplus. Look at the F1 screen.

All your gold from cities goes to science.
You make 637 gold from other civs and 50 from interest.
219 of that is used for maintenance.

Is the idea to just make science for 1 turn ? no matter if citizens starve ?

The rules were that you can't let any cities starve or revolt and no negative research (not that it's really possible). Those were about the only rules.

So maintenance is calculated after everything else is. That does explain it. I was thinking the maintenance would come off first.

So after I finished my experiments here is what I can come up with.

Using my 1550 save, I changed all the cops (except Bede's Steakhouse because they are his favorite) to beakerheads. I'll attach the save if anyone wants to look at it.

That brought the 100% science down to 1257 with 104 scientists
After the IBT it tallied out at 1421 beakers + 104 scientists.
I think this works out to 1733 beakers

After changing all the LIB builds (in 90% corrupt cities) to wealth the end result was 1412 + 104 scientists.
I then kept only the Tenoch (pop 12) build and got 1416
I then kept only the Septum (pop 6) build and got 1412 again
There were 9 beakers lost by changing Libs to wealth. My gut feeling is that cities over pop 6 got some benefits from the Libs.

I then changed the cities with 30%-50% corruption to cops (the only change from the original)
1433+98 scientists = 1727
Conclusion: if science is your only concern beakerheads are better than cops

I then changed the Court builds only (5 were in 15% corr or less cities, 1 in 36%)
1401 +104 scientists = 1713
So the extra 6 upkeep netted 20

I then changed just the cop shops (9 between 12% and 36% corruption)
1382% + 104 = 1694
A 39g difference

So personally, my final decision is that unless your Civ is richer than god and you are trying to finish in as little time as possible, Bede's advice about builds is right. I'm not convinced cops are so great unless you are relying on medium corrupt cities for builds.

Pay close attention to WOA's comment. The implications are interesting for a game where you are shaving it closer than we are in this game.

Amd thank you Phaedo for another insightful analysis.

I love cops because with the right government (Communism) you can enjoy perfectly tuned cities with no corruption, no waste and no overruns. It's an aesthetic thing more than anything else.

Thanks, everyone! I'd like to say that I thoroughly assessed the situation, calculating gross and net beakers and corruption, but my process was really much less analytical (& much more "fiddly") than that. I guess the process is the same "Bedean Algebra" that Bede used in Aabra01 to mm the empire a while back.

I used CA2 to sort cities by corruption, from lowest to highest. Then I started with the lowest corruption city and worked my way to the highest, tinkering with citizens until I got max beakers. I fiddled with citizen placement and specialists, and just kept going back and forth until I couldn't squeeze any more beakers out of a city (though I did look at my save after submission to discover that I had one leftover tax collector . . . drat!). I did rush a couple of libraries and unis, where I felt that the extra beakers justified the cost. (And when I say "justified the cost," I mean that I would have bought them in a regular game, not just for the Challenge.)

In the core (<~35% corruption), it always paid off to put citizens back to work. This was especially true if the city had a lib and uni, and most of them did. There were some surprising results in the core. I found several instances where mined tiles produced more beakers than anticipated, when I had expected a higher yield from other tiles.

Once I moved out into the semi-core, the process became even more "fiddly" than it was in the core. Once I figured out that putting core citizens back to work was the answer, I could just put them all back to work, and shuffle them around until I hit the right numbers. But that ~35% corruption point became significant in the semi-core. Below that point, working citizens make more sense. Above it, specialists begin to make more sense. I say "begin" because it depended on the terrain available to me in the semi-core. If I had high-gold tiles, I might be able to max beakers by putting everyone to work and squeezing extra beakers into the uncorrupted side of the equation. If I had lots of food, but little gold, I hired scientists. I tried out some police officers, but they never had enough of an effect on beakers to make more sense than scientists.

Once I got into the hinterlands, it went back to a predictable pattern. This time, though, it was "work high-food tiles & hire as many scientists as possible." Again, I tried a couple of police, but the scientists were consistently better, beaker-wise.

As for builds, as I said, I rushed a couple of libraries and unis, grabbing the multiplier for the "per turn" beakers. Otherwise, the only build that I switched was one specialist farm that was one turn from building a settler. I don't remember what I put in its place, but I didn't want my scientist reassigned.

Thanks to everyone who took the challenge and special thanks to Bede for taking the time to set it up and score it!

I'm still not quite sure what I did wrong. Like Aabra, I started with the least corrupt city, the capital, and worked my way out to increasingly corrupted towns. I didn't use CA2 and I didn't change any builds because I hadn't seen Bede's subsequent post that I could.

I did all the MMing inside the City Views, getting what I thought were max beakers from each city. Still seems to me like that should have worked , but it obviously didn't. I had no cops and more scientists than the others.

I learned a lot from the exercise. I think I had more beakers than I might have if I were playing it as a personal game and my future games should get better because of this. I definitely need to learn to make CA2 work for me, since I usually only use it to extract game settings. I just haven't yet made the connection between how the other players use it and looking at City Views.

Thanks go to Bede for setting up this exercise. I would LOVE to see more of this type of challenge in the future. A HUGE congratulations to Aabra for winning this!!!

I've been going through the various saves. (I have a very hard time getting my head around the math in Phaedo's post without going to the saves themselves.) One thing that immediately struck me is that The Grumpy One never posted his own save . . .

A couple of other things struck me:
1) Phaedo had 1450 beakers from 100% science. That's a huge mondo load o'beakers, almost 200 more than I had, yet came out 36 beakers behind me in total beakers.
2) Tim supported 7 more scientists than I did, and (according to CA2) gathered more beakers on the IBT than I did, by ~25 beakers. But it didn't look like he rushed any builds.

Aabraxan said:

1) Phaedo had 1450 beakers from 100% science. That's a huge mondo load o'beakers, almost 200 more than I had, yet came out 36 beakers behind me in total beakers.

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Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems like some of those 100% science beakers (based on amount of gold) would be corrupted, just as some of the gold would be corrupted. The total beakers shown in the F1 screen appeared to be before corruption, but I'm not sure of that. When I first looked at Phaedo's F1 screenie, I was sure he had the win, but the screenie only showed the first few cities.

2) Tim supported 7 more scientists than I did, and (according to CA2) gathered more beakers on the IBT than I did, by ~25 beakers. But it didn't look like he rushed any builds.

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As you pointed out to me via PM after we'd both submitted our saves, I gathered 4 more on the IBT, and I had more scientists than either of you, but I still had the lowest total score, and lower beaker numbers for ongoing subsequent turns.

I don't mind having the lowest score if I can learn something from this and what I did wrong. Learning to do better will be the biggest, longest-lasting prize of all for me.

A couple of things: The math in my post came from what I understood to be Bede's formula. The gold to science number + (the number of scientists multiplied by 3). I was just going by CAII when I was doing my submission so I didn't see any difference between scientists and cops. I left the cops in hopes that perhaps I'd get an extra beaker or two from the corrupt Lib builds. Once all the cops were switched to beakers, it worked out to 104 scientists (312 beakers) rather than the 51 (153 beakers) I submitted. I used that as the base and just changed some things to see the difference. I used this save because I think that If I had changed all the cops to scientists for the submission, my save would have tallied out as the highest (I could be wrong though).

I think the majority of my extra science on thge IBT was from the comercial docks. These gave an extra raw gold for the ocean squares which then went through all the multipliers. They were in relatively uncorrupt cities. The same with the uni builds. When you factor in the courts and the cop shops and the bit of extra form the Libs, I think it accounts for the leap in science spending on the IBT. I also used the GSL for a boost in research. I'm not sure how the last one actually works, but it did say there was a 10&#37; increase in research. That would get factored in on the IBT and not before. There were also 2 workers mining that had movement left. These went to a science farm but could have been used in an uncorrupt city for greater value I think.

I still have a nagging feeling that there is something more going on though. Especially as CAII gives a pretty good indication of how much research will run over. I haven'T checked it with that in mind though. I certainly will, the next time it comes up as it should every set in the Aabra01 game.

"I still have a nagging feeling that there is something more going on though." quoth Phaedo.

I am not capable of reverse engineering CA2 to tell you exactly what is going on but my horse dealer's eye tells me that there are inconsistencies between CA2's handling of data and its presentation and the way the game handles data and presents information.

On some screens in CA2 it is a presentation of data derived from the save, number of specialists and types for example. On other screens the derived data has had operations performed on it and the calculations in CA2 are not always the same as the calculations in the game; the calculation of corruption and the effects of modifier buildings are an example.

In other instances the presentation of data in the game is just plain confusing though the meaning can be teased out if you are willing to look far enough.

In any event the Domestic Advisor screen is the presentation of the information that rules.

My reading of the tea leaves in this mini-event tells me that Aabra did two things more effectively - placing the right citizens on the right fields and gathering his specialists. Phaedo did the first far better than any one else, but didn't put enough specialists, or the right specialists, down.

And the Grumpy started with the Challenge save and then played on, but got so immersed in what he was doing forgot to pull out the save before it got over written.

But here's the Domestic Advisor

I spent some time going through saves and sreenshots last night and I've noticed something that bothers me. There's something going on in the beaker & corruption calculations that I don't understand. I looked at the amount of income generated by cities, corruption, and beakers generated. Generally, [From Cities] - [Corruption] = [Beakers]. But not always. This may seem a little OC, but I put it into a table:



As you can see, the saves & screens from gmaharriet, myself and TimBentley all follow the formula above. But when you get to Phaedo (the first one), he's generating 35 fewer beakers than the formula says he should. Bede's generating 9 fewer than the formula says he should. Is this just a function of the rounding that goes on in the math?

Also, note that gmaharriet's corruption is identical to Phaedo's, in spite of a difference of over 300 gold being generated by the cities.

Edit: @ Phaedo: I don't think scientific GAs work. I don't know if they don't work at all, or if they just hang up on the last turn, so I don't know if your SGA had any effect at all.

@ Bede

Nothing to do with this challenge, but where'd you get the pop heads with the little symbols for Scientists? I could really use those! I can easily tell the difference between Hard-Hats, Cops, and Clowns, but not so easily when it comes to Scientists and Taxmen.

eldar said:

@ Bede

Nothing to do with this challenge, but where'd you get the pop heads with the little symbols for Scientists? I could really use those! I can easily tell the difference between Hard-Hats, Cops, and Clowns, but not so easily when it comes to Scientists and Taxmen.

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I got them from one of Bede's posts in the SG, Clive1, a long time ago. Here's the link. http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=2133865&postcount=718

They not only have the symbols for scientists, they also use the color band for the civ just beneath each citizen, so it's very easy to see which citizens may be foreigners. Notice the grey band under some of the citizens in Bengal in Bede's post above.

Excellent And is the a version of these for PtW/Vanilla as well?

That I don't know. I could never figure out just what Bede was linking to, and I spent a lot of time looking through the CFC graphic files looking for it.

I know that you can't use vanilla/PTW popheads for C3C, because cops and CE's weren't added until C3C. I'm not sure if there would be a reverse problem going from C3C to vanilla/PTW. Maybe Bede can answer that.

I must say that this whole challenge has been very educational. After looking at the saves and the approaches that the various players took, I've learned a number of things about the economics of science. Gmaharriet and I have been discussing the different approaches and we finally decided to put our heads together and see just how many beakers we could squeeze out of Bede's Challenge #1, knowing what we now know.

I am submitting this save and screenshot for comparison's sake. I'd like to emphasize that it's not being submitted for bragging, nor is it intended to compete against the other saves. It's the result of a great deal of fiddling, experimenting, discussion and some reloading, and it's the work of two players, not one, so it's not fit for competition in this challenge.

In my first run at the the challenge, I only rushed maybe 3-5 builds in the process. That was a mistake on my part and I think Phaedo rushed many more builds than I did. So when gmaharriet and I redid this, we rushed more builds, reduced corruption further, and were able to substantially increase science. We were able to draw 1337 beakers off of the economy, and 129 specialists for a total beaker count of 1724.

Some new stuff that I learned:

1) Courthouses and Police Stations usually have the same effect on science.
2) The SGA doesn't have any impact on the science calculated on the F1 screen. (I reloaded several times testing this. It never had any effect.) That means that the 1450 that Phaedo generated from his economy was purely the result of his MMing and none of it was the result of the SGA. Nor does it affect the number of specialists (obviously), so it didn't affect Phaedo's score.
3) In a well developed core, even at 0&#37; science, our cities were generating science. In one city, I noticed that the city square was generating 5 gold and the city was making 26 beakers. And that was with all clowns.

At any rate, thanks again to Bede for setting this up and scoring.

Nice job, AAbraxan and gmaHarriet (or is it gmaHarrier?)

And I forgot to point this out before the reason "The SGA doesn't have any impact on the science calculated on the F1 screen." is because the SGA doesn't work, never has.